Читать книгу Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table - Nigel Slater - Страница 29

The curious fact about Oxo cubes is that we have probably never really needed them. These little cubes of salt, beef extract and flavourings were, and I suppose still are, used to add ‘depth’ to stews, gravies and pie fillings made with ‘inferior’ meat. Two million are sold in Britain each day. Yet any half-competent cook knows you can make a blissfully flavoursome stew with a bit of scrag and a few carrots, without recourse to a cube full of chemicals and dehydrated cow.

Apart from showing disrespect to the animal that has died for our Sunday lunch (imagine bits of someone else being added to your remains after you have been cremated), the use of a strongly seasoned cube to ‘enhance’ the gravy successfully manages to sum up all that is wrong about the British attitude to food. How could we fail to understand that the juices that drip from a joint of decent meat as it cooks are in fact its heart and soul, and are individual to that animal. Why would anyone need to mask the meat’s natural flavour? By making every roast lunch taste the same, smothering the life out of the natural pan juices seems like an act of culinary vandalism, and people did, and still do, just that on a daily basis.

Yet the Oxo cube has played a very important role in the British kitchen. It gave us a guaranteed, copious lubricant for our meat, and in the years after the war, the existence of gravy was something to be celebrated. Gravy carried with it an air of achievement and success, but more importantly, it announced a return to normality after years of rationing. It gave us a taste of home as we felt it should be. The red and white box in the pantry was as much a signature of a happy, well-fed home as the teapot and the cake tin. And in the factory-farming years that followed, when modern breeds and cheap production values meant that meat lost much of its inherent goodness and savour, the Oxo was there as a much-needed culinary sticking plaster.

The cube’s success also had much to do with the tactile pleasure of tearing open the red and silver foil and crumbling the compost-brown cube into the meat tin, in the style of the ‘perfect, squeaky-clean mum’ from the television adverts. Sadly, in my experience adding that diminutive cube to the contents of the roasting tin will be forever linked with well-done meat. I can’t imagine anyone who appreciated rare beef chucking a load of glutinous gravy on it. If you buy sound meat in the first place, the brown cube is effectively made not just redundant, but an intrusion.

I once had a friend who ate Oxo cubes like fudge, despite their high levels of salt. I often wonder what her blood pressure is now.